Illustrator CC 2014 extremely choppy. Please help.

[bozogubu]

I just bought an iMac 5k Retina Base model with Yosemite installed. All other CC applications work like a breeze except illustrator. Illustrator is extremely choppy and almost unworkable. Can someone help me out?

[sltplz]

Just go here and make things change everyone!

https://twitter.com/AdobeCare

[Crowe About It]

Tweeted. Will be interesting to see if they respond. I pointed them to this thread.

[dpines1003]

Sadly it will be addressed the same way a city or town hall decides when and where to put a stop sign to slow traffic. Until they get a high enough volume of traffic with the same issue they can't take care of it. I'm worried we're still too small a number for them to give it any attention yet. 

It is though a direct issue with the Retina iMac display, I connected an old 20" apple display as a side monitor and illustrator CC runs fine on that... ugly but fine. It's a little annoying I have to work that way, but it's helping me work faster. 

Is this only isolated to the Retina iMac? Does anyone know if the retina mac book pros have the same issue?  Hopefully they don't over look this small percentage, I feel everyone's frustration.

[sltplz]

Yes I have both MBPR and iMacR, and the situation is the same... sadly.

But we all have to push to have a correct software. Adobe should concentrate on new technologies as much as old ones, after all, creative cc is for professional use, isn't it?

I'm sure the problem is just a freaking bug and no one noticed it.

[Crowe About It]

It's quite funny actually, as the other day I read on their website advertisement which was along the lines of 'support for cutting-edge technologies'. Irony. I've filed a report. They tweeted back to me asking for a screencast/video. So if any is able to provide that it would be great to show them!

Here:

http://i58.tinypic.com/2iub1xh.png

[sltplz]

Adobe Illustrator is extremely choppy on Retina screens - YouTube

[petersch73]

Yes, thats exactly the behavior. Thanks for posting. I`ve sent a  bug report and had a call With Adobe austria. I ve also linker to this post. Until know no mailing.still hoping. But i think i will return imac if possible. I will also test affiniy Designer. But until now i see no alternative to illustrator.

[rezengine]

Submit a bug at Adobe - Feature Request/Bug Report Form

[dpines1003]

Frustration that it's an issue as well with all retina displays. Ya I agree, our companies expect us to be on the front of design and the technology and I feel we're being punished for staying ahead of the game, haha.

You're right, its probably just a freak bug issue that is just random. They'll take care of it, just hopefully sooner rather than later.

I saw the last post, I'll report a bug as well to adobe forum. Thanks again.

[pacifique1234]

I sent a tweet to Adobe Customer Care (@AdobeCare) | Twitter

I share everyones frustration. Here is Adobe's Customer Service phone number:

1 (800) 833-6687

[pacifique1234]

They responded on twitter already.

Adobe Customer Care ‏@AdobeCare 7minutes ago

We've notified the product team for further investigation. Meanwhile, can you also file a bug report? http://adobe.ly/VaXxNA ^A

Everyone should file a bug on this.

[AshutoshChaturvedi]

Hi,

We are investigating the case. Unfortunately we do not have a fix at this moment. Illustrator vector graphics rendering pipeline is a little slow drawing on this extremely high resolution. As people have noticed lowering the resolution speeds up things. The fix will take some time as it requires re-architecture of our rendering engine.

Thank you for your patience.

The Ai team is experimenting with faster rendering using the GPU. If you would like to try this prototype (under NDA) and give your feedback to the team, do fill up this form.

We'll reach out to you through our Pre-release program.

-- Ashutosh

   Adobe

[sltplz]

Great, in big company language it means we'll never see an update before Retina display become dinosaurs.

Come on Adobe you have the ressources of getting us a fix quickly!

[anubhav_r]

One more thing to add to the response above.

Over the last 12 months, we've noticed that screens were starting to get denser and denser (HD->Quad HD->5K) and Apple set a new benchmark by coming out with a 5K screen a month ago. This means that vector editing apps like Illustrator have to compute and display 6 times more pixels as than we have to for your vector art at 1920x1080 resolution displays. This is what is slowing us down.

In anticipation of this "densification" of screens, the Illustrator team has been working on using the GPU to render complex vector artwork. In May 2014, we released a Windows only and nVidia only GPU renderer for Illustrator. We did this because we got a lot of support from nVidia and none from Apple. Apple did not even enable nVidia's path rendering extension on Apple devices that have an nVidia card. Vector rendering on the GPU did not seem like a high priority item for Apple at that time. Thanks to nVidia's help, we were able to modernize our architecture and since May, we have been working on GPU acceleration for MAC and across all GPUs.

This work is coming along nicely and I hope that we can ship this solution sometime next year. We do not have a way to compute and render 6 times as many pixels as full HD at the same performance level without leveraging the GPU.

--Anubhav

Anubhav Rohatgi

Group Product Manager, Design

Adobe

[sltplz]

Just wondering why other vector software like Affinity Designer runs perfectly? I open a document created in Illustrator (who is terribly choppy) in AD, and miracle, it's perfectly fluid on crazy high resolution. Any tought?

[sltplz]

Adobe Illustrator VS Affinity Designer on RETINA DISPLAY - YouTube

Don't try to make me believe Apple is responsible, this is too easy. Adobe is a big boy, it should be able to handle its own problem.

[pacifique1234]

Is Apple aware of the problem? If not, should we reach out to them? Is there anything they can do to help expedite the process?

I just spent over $4k on this Retina iMac and I can't use this $600 software. Naturally I'm disappointed.

[sltplz]

I can't understand why you involve Apple in this. Other companies can make retina vector software run perfectly like Stetch and Affinity, absolutely no performance issue at all. Try the trial version! The issue is related to Adobe and Adobe only. Adobe have a lot of trouble in changing, look what happened with Flash (websites & mobile version)...

[Dangerdom1]

I've noticed, as noted here on the Apple community, that scaling down the size of the document window greatly increases performance for me. Especially when zooming, in Full screen or with a large window the zoom lags with both the zoom tool and key commands, if I shrink the size of the window down it works much better.

[jdotpak]

as I posted earlier, I think there is a resolution dependent problem. And it has nothing to do with the new retina screens as the Adobe rep suggested. I'm using the same hardware as before with no problems pre-Yosemite.

Adobe, you MUST make this highest priority. There are many users like myself whete illustrator (even photoshop feels a bit laggy) is absolutely UNUSABLE. and if that's not the highest priority bug, I don't know what is.

[Crowe About It]

Has anyone tried an earlier edition of Illustrator, say CS6 to see how it runs?

[Doug A Roberts]

i have CS6 and a retina macbook pro. it displays similar symptoms to those described.

[dpines1003]

I back tracked to CS5 illustrator, it looks bad, but it functions normally and a lot faster than CC right now. I've been down grading files I get from clients that are CC formatted and reworking them in CS5. It's defiantly not ideal though.

[Doug A Roberts]

there was no retina update to CS5, so i'd guess no performance hit.

[sltplz]

You don't have to go back to CS5, just CMD+i on illustrator.app using Low Resolution mode, that'll look bad but at least you'll have no performance issue.